“Velvet 4 Sale”

As U.S. Girls, experimental pop songwriter Meghan Remy may make music with familiar tools—voice, synths, guitars and drums—but there’s always something slightly off about it. Whether it’s the patchy strings on 2015’s “Window Shades” or the skewed disco beat on recent single “Mad As Hell,” Remy focuses traditional elements through a surrealist lens. “Velvet 4 Sale,” the opening track off U.S. Girls’ forthcoming album In a Poem Unlimited, sees her singing about taking up arms against violent men while simultaneously toying with even more pop tropes.

At first, “Velvet 4 Sale” resembles a traditional pop song—there’s a verse, a chorus, and a bridge—but Remy populates this framework with subtle, unsettling touches. Using recordings of her breath as percussion, she blurs the line between human and instrument. In kind, her singing sounds unusually compressed, like the sampled breath has been severed from her actual voice. She barely rises above a whisper, and touches of reverb and vocoder makes her words sound shrink-wrapped. But the strangest part of “Velvet 4 Sale” is its guitar solo, which slinks detuned around the chord progression like it’s been imported from a different song entirely. These alien sounds highlight the playful vengeance of her lyrics: “It’s all just friction/But don’t forget the revenge.” On “Velvet 4 Sale,” by edging close to the familiar, but skirting it ever-so-slightly, Remy hits a register that’s more unnerving—and more effective—than if she’d played way out in left field.